by Gary Welz
Innovators I: KPE
This column is the first installment of a series called "Innovators" that will discuss the work of Web developers creating new software and production techniques that push existing technology to its limits.Founded in February 1996, Kaufman Patricof Enterprises, Inc. (KPE) is a New Media production and design company specializing in the development of innovative Internet content, commercial Web site design, and online commerce. With strategic partnerships in the entertainment, technology, publishing, and advertising industries, KPE is merging the many resources of more traditional media with Internet technology and design.
Under the leadership of partners Trevor Kaufman, former Voyager Online Director, and Mark Patricof, former Creative Artists Agency (CAA) executive and Voyager Senior Vice President, Acquisitions and Business Development, KPE recently completed the official Clinton-Gore 96 campaign Web site.
They also built the site for Michelin and have done work for Compuserve, Sony, and Game-Time.
The Clinton-Gore site will be updated daily, and sometimes hourly, with economic data, press releases, and even live audio of speeches. A Java tickertape runs along the bottom of the home page. New sections will be added weekly, including ones for the Convention and the Presidential debates.
Among the unique technical innovations on the Clinton-Gore site are a couple of neat tricks that give the user a more seamless experience.
In one, a server push is used to send a sequence of campaign pictures, but rather than just waiting for the push to begin delivering the images, the user sees an American flag that has been put in as the "low source" while the "high source" is the sequence of pushed images. The flag loads almost immediately, and after a moment the user is pleasantly surprised by the rapid and smooth running slide show.
In another part of the site they've put images in an "invisible" frame that loads while the user is looking at something else. Kaufman describes this as "a way of caching material on the user's hard drive in anticipation of what they'll choose to look at next." It's used in a section devoted to economic data. While you're looking at animated gifs of the deficit shrinking your browser will be loading graphics of jobs growing. When you select the job growth link the animation will begin playing immediately.
Both of these techniques squeeze more media out of the the bandwidth available to the user. They are especially impressive because they exploit to very significant advantage features that have been part of standard HTML for some time but that no one else seems to have noticed.
KPE has also written a Java applet that determines the resolution of the user's screen and loads a different page according to whether it's 640 x 480, 800 x 600, or 1024 x 768 pixels.
One of the most impressive KPE Web innovations is a RealAudio supported slide show--rather like the film strips accompanied by a record that most of us saw in high school. This is being used to present a Web version of "The Man From Hope" the Clinton biographical film shown at the 1992 Democratic convention.
KPE is using this technique in a series of online museum exhibitions entitled "The Electric Ticket" produced in conjunction with Abbeville Press. They are in the process of choosing a museum for the launch of the technology which will allow users to experience a guided tour of a collection right on their desktop. Museums expect to charge for this, and it remains to be seen what, if anything, surfers will pay to tour, say, the Getty Museum or the Smithsonian online.
In addition to the production of corporate Web sites, KPE is currently producing a variety of entertainment programs utilizing the most sophisticated Internet technology and design. To that end, KPE's programming staff is working on the development of new transmission formats, compression techniques, audio and video streaming, and transaction engines.
The company is combining its technological expertise with its knowledge of advertising and sponsorship to develop a premium interactive online entertainment network featuring Hollywood talent, expected to launch in the Spring 1997.
Mr. Kaufman, by the way, has also developed two other significant Web-based technologies: CDLink, a proprietary Internet-based audio technology, and TRADES, the Internet's first proprietary system that verifies credit card transactions and delivers downloadable software online.
